Originally this project was the main page for savagelook.com, but I decided it to shuffle to “projects” on my blog. While it is was a very cool showcase of the things I had learned so far using Away3D, Flint particles, FLARToolkit, FLARManager, TweenMax & TimelineMax, its not really practical for a main interface… yet. Here’s the things I learned in this initial undertaking that I plan to apply to all future projects involving Away3D(Lite), particularly when the average user is the target audience:
- Performance ALWAYS has to be on your mind. There’s nothing more annoying to users than low frame rates. Many of my next points relate directly to this.
- Use Renderer.BASIC as your view’s renderer whenever feasible. You will take an immediate performance hit trying to use the smarter z-sorting renderers (CORRECT_Z_ORDER or INTERSECTING_OBJECTS)
- Control the size of the view. While a resizeable view that fills the browser seem great, you can take a nasty performance hit on high resolutions. For example, this project runs like a champ with a standard 800×600 or 1024×768 resolution. When I jump it up to 1680×1050, though, things start to get a little choppy.
- 3D particles are a whore on resources. Fake 3D effects with 2D whenever possible. You can literally get 100x (or more) particles in 2D and maintain the same frame rate as 3D.
- Use simultaneous tweens judiciously. There were noticeable slow downs in my intro animations when more than one tween was operating at a time.
- Learn your z-sorting and plan it from the beginning. I can’t tell you how much time I wasted restructuring my scene and code because I didn’t take the time to learn Frustum clipping, ownCanvas, pushback, pushfront, and screenZoffset before starting.
- Interactivity and camera motion impacts performance. Static scenes will allow for far more polys at a good frame rate than dynamic ones. Keeping the camera static or using mouseEnabled = false on your objects may help.
- Users expect 2D dialogs and text. Use them whenever feasible to convey information to the user.
- Make sure you clean up your unused objects. ”scene.removeChild(obj)” and “obj = null” should become your best friend.
- Reuse objects and materials whenever possible. Its a lot easier and less expensive to toggle the visibility of a relatively simple object rather than destroy and recreate it every time.
- Only render when you need to. When I use 2D layout for the “Bio” section, I stop rendering the covered 3D scene to help performance.
- Use texture baking or similar techniques to fake lighting. Real-time lighting, while cool, chews up a lot of resources. If it isn’t critical, fake it.
- Materials with alphas process slower.
- When all else fails, hit the . It may not have the fastest responses, but there’s no better place to get help and guidance.
I’m sure there’s lots more I picked up in the process, but that’s a pretty good assessment. Hopefully this helps anyone getting started on their own Away3D projects.
I don’t have any specific plans to make version 2.0 of the savagelook.com 3D interface, but I’ve got a few ideas rolling around in my head. The key factors will be simplicity, speed, more pseudo-3D effects using 2D, and use of Away3DLite. I’m hoping to really represent Away3D next time.
